Monday, June 22, 2009

Sequoia Salty Vanilla Chocolate

My husband and I were meandering around a Family Mart convenience store when he spied this "salty vanilla" Sequoia bar. For those who don't know, Sequoia is an original Japanese brand of wafer bar. It isn't a KitKat knock-off. It just looks like one. He said, "this looks like something I'd like," and hence a review was born. I'm always much more likely to try something if I know I'll just have a bit and he'll finish the rest. This is one way to keep the sweets consumption under control for me, though I can't say it works so well for him. It's not that Sequoia bars are too huge for one person to eat, mind you. They're about the total volume of two and a half KitKat fingers.

I sort of wonder how someone decided that salt and vanilla would be a good combination. A comedic collision like the ones about gettings one's chocolate in another's peanut butter comes to mind, but I'm guessing this has more to do with the people at Furuta jumping on the salty vanilla bandwagon or just plain running out of ideas for what they could easily slap together without spending a fortunate on food coloring. I can see the buchos (higher level managers) brainstorming and talking about new flavors. Suggestions for grape, blueberry, or melon are bandied about but no one wants to buy purple, blue or green food dye. The guy who suggested salting down the white chocolate probably got an extra bonus.

I kept this bar in the refrigerator because the weather has been so hot lately. Nonetheless, this was very soft when I took it out for pictures. I wouldn't carry this around in my pocket for long in the summer.

The chocolate coating is advertised as "milk cream" and the "center is "vanilla cream". I think that part of the problem I had with this bar is that I couldn't taste either vanilla or salt much at all, and that is likely because the flavoring is not in the coating, but only between the wafers. Mainly, I could taste shattering white chocolate sweetness. This is an incredibly cloying bar. The strange thing is that I kind of liked it despite that, but probably only in the way that one sometimes really likes a super strong hit of sugar. The flavor had very little depth. I am confident that I wouldn't be so fond of it on a revisit.